I guess that begs the question, what should you put up when your business is stealth! The hope was people would enjoy the experience enough to "trust" us with the email and a follow-up down the road.
I guess that begs the question, what should you put up when your business is stealth!
You should be working on your product instead of futzing around with a placeholder web site that you don't actually intend anyone to see.
If you actually want to gauge customer interest and collect e-mails, then put some content on that page and worry about the presentation (and I actually think that's a really good idea). As things stand, if you won't give any real info on the page then you're just dicking around, and it won't make a bit of difference to your business whether you put up the site you have now, a text only "Under Construction" page, or a trollface with a hand drawn penis chewing on its ear. Even any e-mails that you do collect are essentially worthless because they're not targeted at all to your product, so any signups just indicate that some people will inexplicably sign up for anything at all...
Agree with your sentiment which is why I only allowed an afternoon to put it together and out. My reason for posting was, honestly to see if people actually felt it reflected so poorly that I should replace it with the standard hand-drawn peni chewing on ear.
Re: focusing on the actual product. This was the first "hello world" deployed with the dev-environment setup. SCM, scripts, and all that BS that's annoying to setup after you haven't done it in years was where the majority of the time was spent. I'm pretty sad how long it took me to setup everything.
Re: random emails, great point. The majority of the people who sign up are people I speak to directly or are in my network.
You may be interested to know that today I've only had about 36 non-garbage looking sign-ups and seems like around ~630 page views. So about 5% of views today resulted in a sign up.
I created http://duringconstruction.com/ for reasons such as this. Naturally it has to be a little more generic but you can get it up by only changing DNS. It gives you all of the benefits while wasting as little time as possible.
I think the page you put up has personality but there really wasn't anything to hook me into giving up my email address. I think being completely stealthy and getting lots of email addresses and/or is impossible or at least very difficult unless you have a high profile personality involved. Without that I need something to pique my curiousity.
Cool idea. I checked it out and thought it was a nice site.
Yeah, I'm not really going for emails, just thought it was funny to have a talking owl try to coax someone to sign up for something they had no clue about. I think I may enjoy it more than anyone.
Thanks for the help and I'll make sure to pass your link along next time I see someone considering building an "under-construction" page.
Thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it.